“The librarian can help. It's her job to study this stuff, after all. She'll help the pain stop. Please, Iniga, don't struggle, don't—” Her words fade into a cry and her muscles tense, startling movement in the world around us. In the distance, the face of the cliff tumbles to the ground in an avalanche, and whirlwinds eddy in the sand at our feed.
As the world roils around us, eagerly gathering itself into her, it hits me. This whole thing is a dream. Italy, the concert, everything. I pinch myself, but am just left with a sore arm. The edge of my pants begins to disintegrate as Aletta gains ground on me.
I swear and run after her. That girl will be the death of me, whoever she is.
Whatever she is.
Chapter Eleven: Disconnect
Aletta:
I'm no longer a succubus, no longer a demon in dreams; I am the golem of legend.
My cheeks are wet with tears. They mix with the earth packed over my flesh, forming mud. It eats at me, though, pressing into my flesh so firmly that it is as much a part of me as my skin. Perhaps it's sentient with the life slipping away from me with every tear.
To drain the world enough that Iniga's attacks cannot harm us, I have to pull so heavily on it that the fabric weakens, all features of the landscape draining to an endless plain, devoid even of plants. All of that potential is packed into me, stiffening my joints, hardening my skin. It hurts, working itself deeper into my mind and flooding me with a thousand points of potential or violence.
But as the plain stretches further, my elation grows. My vision makes sense. I remember the true path from my vision, the road my feet traveled as that anonymous incubus guided me. It's still inside me, and we aren't lost.
Iniga fights with a strength born of pain. I know it all too well. Every injury heaped on you during your life being re-inflicted at once, without fading or lessening. Every thought you had, or feeling, being pounded into your ears with a chisel. You fight to maintain who you are, until you realize that you aren't fighting the world—not yet—you're fighting yourself. Your will to forget, to start fresh. The only way you can keep these memories into the next life is to accept them completely, even the pain.
Many incubi give in, release all of them, losing every aspect of themselves. They take longer to develop, because of the mental damage sustained from it. Only those who have been flashed take longer to rebirth.
But some of us fight. We can't believe this is truly the last time we will recognize our friends, or family, or descendants. And even without words, that possibility is felt.
Iniga is fighting. I can't tell if I'm one of those she is fighting to keep, but I beg her not to, just in case. Better to lose my sister in spirit than to lose us all.
I whisper to her, cajole her to listen. But with every step, she throws her consciousness against mine, crushing me in wave after wave of borrowed violent experience. Stolen kisses, skin aflame, her neck snapping, her father beating her. They blur together into a torrent of agony that devastates me, threatens to dwarf my own remembered pain.
The world catches her attack as I seek to shove it away from myself, and I force it back, with ten times the vitriol. Her anger lashes across me, peeling my skin away from my bone.
Still, I don't slow. I only cry, and press forward.
Han:
It's hard to hide my anger. I don't entirely know why I'm bothering to; Aletta hasn't so much as looked at me over several hours walking. I don't even think her eyes are open. She could have left me behind at any point, and wouldn't have even noticed.
It underscores that I'm not her partner; I'm only ever a blip on her radar. And that's a horrifying realization to have, in a nightmare like this. The land stretches on with no markers—she could be leading us in circles for all I know.
As we move on, she looks less and less like the woman I knew. Correction. As we move on, she looks less and less like a woman, or even a human. Her outline blurs under the clouds of dust that embrace her, but what I can see of it in between those swirls and eddies is wrong, and fluid. One moment, her wrists are covered in fur, and the next, scales. Her limbs lengthen and shrink. Her hair solidifies into a helmet, no longer fluidly streaming strands. One of her hands has no flesh on the bone.
I hide my revulsion, trying to reconcile the creature keeping me prisoner in her footsteps to the woman who slept against my shoulder when she was afraid.
I can't do it.
I seize her flesh-covered hand, try to prove to myself that I'm imagining things, that she's still the person I was falling for. But her fingers don't tighten around mine, don't show any recognition of my touch. I squeeze tighter, but her flesh is like stone.
Her lips part, murmur to herself. A lullaby, or folk song. I don't recognize it. But her tenderness holding the doll's familiar, makes her less threatening to me.
Once again, I remind myself of her face while I laughed at her, at her insistence that she could be whole, if she could exorcise the ghost in her head. If only I knew the extent of it.
This whole thing has to be a dream, an expression of guilt. Not hers, maybe, but mine. Maybe I pushed her to this, and am trying to process that my words could have had that effect on her. I never saw myself as the type to be able to provoke someone to break down, but maybe my rejection did.
That was why I hadn't want to be involved in the first place, once I realized the potential for harm I had. But in my kindness, attempting to support her, and then faltering, maybe I'd done the damage anyways.
Maybe this is a nervous breakdown. Maybe she committed suicide, and I'm torturing myself with the guilt of having been with her earlier, that fateful night.
My bones ache; I don't feel fatigued, exactly, but I do feel tired. Drained. Home, work, feels so far away, I can hardly remember the details. I can't explain how I know it, but somehow, I know the world is attached to me, like a leech. As it is to her.
We pass a pen on the ground, and I recognize it as the one my favorite teacher gave me when I graduated, the type of useless expense that feels grown-up, but doesn't actually offer a tangible benefit. As it dissolves into the ground, I forget why I was looking at it. I cling harder to the thought of my family, begging the world to leave them be, take everything else, but leave them be.
I watch to see if Aletta is drawn to her own recollections, but there's nothing to cue me in. No tells in the landscape that might show me she's still human. And she no longer has eyes, simply flattened sections of bone. But, to be fair, it's been obvious for hours that she doesn't need them.
I offer to carry the doll, hoping she'll trust me as she did in when we retrieved the dirt-stuff. And for the first time, she acknowledges me. Turns me down with a jerk of her chin, but still. I'll take what I can get.
And it was that thought, that connection. I try to bring her back to me, stroking her hand as I picture her hand on my thigh during that concert, her lips against mine. Her head turns toward me, though her steps don't waver.
“Please talk to me, please—”
The pressure the world is putting on me lessens, and a portion of her dusty shield separates to wrap around me, as well. “We're almost there. Almost.” She tries to smile, but it's not reassuring.
“Where?”
“The archives. Where there's help.”
“What kind of help? More like you? What are you?”
Her cheeks tense around nonexistent eyesockets. “I am reborn. I am sex, made flesh. Or at least made dream.”
“That doesn't help. What's happening? What are we doing?”
Her mouths twitch in a faint smile at my 'we'. “I am a succubus. I pray to God that Iniga is as well.”
Wrapped in her protections, feeling an almost druglike sense of comfort, I see beyond the remainder of the dust cloud, see the entirety of the changes. Her dull, black flesh, nearly translucent. Barely more opaque than the dust that covered it. The eyeless skull and harsh cheekbones, really more akin in structure to a corpse than a person. None of her beauty, or youth, or light. A bein
g of sadness and horror.
I bite back a retch, to have fallen in line with that thing. I'm walking with a demon. I've nearly died for a demon. My burns ache more fiercely from the dust abrading them.
“We're almost there, but it's so hard. She's fighting me so much. I can't take much more.” Her lips twitch. “I didn't fight half this hard.”
I shiver. “So what does a succubus do?” I want to snort in disbelief, but that confession makes too much sense, faced with that sightless face.
“We seduce.”
That admission makes me feel violated, and that turns to raw anger. This whole time, she was playing some sort of long game. Her skin against mine, so soft...but somehow this...I start to retch. Some part of me hears the revulsion in her voice, but it can't get past the surface of my anger. Her fingers close around mine, and while once I might have found that encouraging, it just primes me to let my temper loose.
“That's what you did to me? That's why you were in my dreams? To use me?”
“Those were my orders. I'm not very good at following them.”
The feel of her lips against mine. Her legs wrapped around me. Fuck no. I pull my hand away, and stop walking.
I refuse to be used, strung along more. This whole time, she's been using me. I have to bet she still is, making me think the world won't exist without her.
Several muscles in her neck and shoulders twitch, and she turns back to her doll. Her steps carry her on, but I plant my ass on the ground, and wait for her to fade from my sight.
I've lost her, so much as I can considering I never had her.
Chapter Twelve: Abandon
Aletta:
Some part of me wants to turn back, to beg Han to come, again, but I can't. Iniga is fading fast, the doll's hair dulled, its clothes decaying on it, as her spirit loses the strength to maintain even that inanimate form, despite my efforts to cushion her in my consciousness.
I haven't gotten this far with her to let her slip away so close to help.
His disgust haunts me. It's the mirror of everything I've felt as I attempted to be the good succubus. I'll have to come back for him later; I can't abandon him, and I have no guarantee he'll wake if I don't guide his spirit home. But I can't argue with him, not when our delay will endanger Iniga.
For a moment, I thought he might be able to love me. I thought he might be able to accept me, irrational behavior and all. But that was a lie. For all his indignation at me using him, he used me the same way, trying to placate some kind of internal guilt.
It underscores the contradiction in who I am. I never will be the good succubus. Maybe Iniga will, in time. I couldn't say. But the chance is hers, to do what she will with it.
And the choice is mine. Always has been. Once Iniga's hold on me is gone, I'll write myself out, let myself die. Maybe my experiences will be a useful case study regarding the fate of incubi who are not brought into Limbo right away, since my perceptions may be clearer than Iniga's by the time the trip's done. But I honestly don't care.
It makes me feel good to have completed my last mission. I would be through with him anyways, with his seed wrapped inside me, carefully preserved, and the first steps to write my own nature into it well underway. It's a distraction that probably doesn't help in controlling Iniga. But I can't leave it behind, without admitting failure. And I'd like to end things on a somewhat triumphant note.
There's no longer a man behind me. I can't recall his name. The world's hungry; I'm giving pieces of myself to it, in exchange for letting Iniga keep pieces of herself.
But I don't have to do this very much longer. The fabric is thinning; very soon I'll be able to push into Limbo and see this through.
And just in time, too. I'm stretched thin, my soul distorting with each blow, as Iniga flings her pain at me on one side, and the world throws its pain at me on the other, seeking to steal every reaction it can, hungry for feeling and life. Razor blades whip my skin, slicing bits of me away and dissolving them into the air. My exposed flesh burns, the sand and grit cascading over it and peeling muscle from placeholder bones, packing itself into the holes in my substance.
I offer myself to it, one memory, one limb at a time. A fitting sacrifice.
And when the time is right, I entangle bloody fingers in the weave of reality, and pull it apart. It shifts before me, welcoming me. No—welcoming Iniga.
Chapter Thirteen: Isolate
Han:
I curse myself again for letting Aletta leave. Demonic bitch she may have been, but her voice would be an extreme comfort right now. The world has changed, without her. It has landmarks again, a landscape. That should seem like a relief, but it doesn't. The fields around me remind me of the land around Florence, but that only nudges me back to, again, concern for Aletta, and anxiety over this nightmare.
I don't like having this much time to think. I haven't had it since I was too young to work. I grew up in poverty, and was so terrified of staying in it, I got to be the obsessive kind of achiever.
Time to think means time to evaluate. It means time to admit just how lost I feel. Aletta didn't force me into anything. I wanted a distraction, an adventure, since finance wasn't all it was cracked up to be.
I wanted to be different from the assholes I work with. I'd been a pretty big jerk as a kid; it felt like my father's and cousin's suicides were direct proof that the world they existed in was broken. I thought that meant our heritage was broken, not that the reserve was. After my mom remarried and moved off-reserve, I got worse. It felt like my dad's death was a repudiation of the place I could have had in his life, and I didn't want to give anything that had space in his life currency in mine, when he hadn't done the same.
With time and growth, much later, I wanted to feel closer to my roots, closer to my grandfather's stories. I still felt alien in more placid settings and workplaces. And that feeling never really left. I was half convinced it was something wrong with me, and was determined to see all that I closed off.
Aletta seemed like she felt the same thing. Maybe that was why I wanted to help her find herself abroad. I never actually believed in her world. So it seems like hubris that I'm trapped here.
I don't know if I'm going to get hungry; I have to think I won't, but I scan the area for any materials I can use for trapping food, just in case. I haven't build a trap since I was a kid, but I hope I can remember how. I don't recognize any of the plants as familiar or edible.
It seems like a stupid worry to have, since we were moving so long that I should have felt hunger long before now. Maybe it's me trying to superimpose some kind of natural order on this place, to quell the fear I should be feeling.
The only one who could really say already walked away.
I sigh, and try to find a comfortable place to settle. No point in moving until I have an idea of where to move to.
A low gurgle interrupts my thoughts, and I stiffen. I don't recognize the scenery; the world shifted again, but slowly enough that I failed to notice. A coyote walks by, staring at me, and I'm horrified to recognize the intelligence in its eyes. Its mouth seems to smirk as it pants, and I give it the most level look I can, to assure it I'm not its prey.
It casts another look at me, this one coolly disapproving. “Goddamn wanderers.” Its voice reverberates in my head, rather than my ears, and my bones vibrate.
“What?”
“Goddamn wanderers. Idiots, the lot of you.”
“What?”
“So, I just passed this other woman. Absolute fucking nutter. Couldn't arse herself to say hello, either.”
“Oh. Well, hello.” Better to not get on its bad side.
“And a hello to you too.”
The beast turns away, talking to something I don't see. “Yeah, I know. Absolute fucking nutters. They're not going to survive long like that, innit?”
I shake my head as the coyote walks on.
I lose time in that place, but watch my surroundings more carefully. No more animals try talking to me, but a
beetle the size of my house nearly stomps me as it walks by. It manages to destroy one of my traps—not that I think I could feel comfortable killing whatever I might catch, with the likelihood of it talking.
A dark dot appears on the horizon. Aletta? I try to squash my hope at that thought, but fail. For all my anger at her, for how used I felt, I've seen how she treats friends, and I have to think she considers me a friend, after all we went through. I don't think she could lie to me, or herself, that completely.
I chose the kind of person I wanted to be, and I don't regret that, though it's bitten me pretty hard. And I want to know who she is. Because I think I know who she wants to be, too.
I wait for the new visitor to approach, wishing I had a pocket knife or a pistol, just in case it isn't Aletta.
Finally, an old man approaches me. “You got a connection? Got a contract?”
I have no clue what the hell he's talking about, but something in his bearing puts me off; his flesh has the same translucency that Aletta's did, but its form is constant, only the muscles twitching as he moves. I feel what's wrong before I see it. His body is barely holding itself together, the transparency filling in spots where chunks have obviously been ripped out of it. And he's eying me entirely too eagerly. “You're not one of them?”
I wait for an attack, now certain it'll come.
“Good.”
A knife flashes in his hand, and he lunges for me.
Chapter Fourteen: Rebirth
Aletta:
The librarian stares at me. “It's been a long time since one of my students sought me out. I suspect there's a story in this.” There's a blank book beneath her hand, but I know I can't simply expunge the knowledge into it. I have to know.
Instead, I fight to show my dreams, Iniga's dreams, on a bare patch on the table. She shoves paperwork over it, before the vision is clear. “Don't be rude, girl. Talk like a normal succubus.” She taps her head.
Beyond The Veil: A Paranormal & Magical Romance Boxed Set Page 60
